1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a monitoring tool for use in a telecommunications system which automatically monitors one or more automatic call distributors (ACD) and provides an indication of the status of such ACDs in essentially real time.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Automatic call distributors (ACD) are known in the art. Such ACDs are telecommunications devices, used by various manufactures and service providers, to handle a relatively huge volume of calls and distribute them among a relatively few agents. Such ACDs are known to be networked and interconnected with interactive voice response units (IVR). As such, calls to a company's customer service telephone are provided with menu options by the IVR depending on the type of service required. The caller's selection is then used to route the call to the appropriate ACD in the network. One or more agent groups are normally affiliated with each of the ACDs in the network. The call is routed to an agent group and held until one of the agents is available to take the call. The calls are normally distributed to the agents according to various criteria. For example, the call may be routed to the agent in the agent group that has been idle the longest. Alternatively, the call may be routed to the agent based on the caller's telephone number or the number dialed by the caller. If all of the agents are busy, the call may be held in queue or routed to another agent group, for example, for a predetermined time period or the caller may be requested to leave a voice mail message for later call back.
Such ACDs are known to be provided by a number of manufacturers. For example, Lucent Technologies, Rockwell, Toshiba and STE are all known manufacturers of ACDs. An important aspect of such ACDs is the efficiency by which the incoming service calls are handled. As such, all of the providers of such ACDs are known to provide online monitoring of the ACDs. Unfortunately, such systems are monitored manually on a query basis. In other words, service technicians must manually query or poll each of the ACDs to determine its status, which can be time consuming. Once an alarm condition is detected, a service technician is subsequently dispatched to correct the problem. Unfortunately, with such a system, an ACD can be out of service for several hours and perhaps days depending on the location of the service technician relative to the ACD and the severity of the problem. While such ACDs are out of service, the call answering time potentially increases, perhaps leading many customer calls unanswered, potentially causing customer ill will toward the company and increased call traffic when the ACD is returned to service. Thus, there is a need for a monitoring system which lowers the response time and provides continuous and automatic monitoring of the various conditions in order to reduce the amount of time such ACDs are out of service.